WHITEHALL has raised the prospect of Japanese taxpayers helping to fund Britain’s next generation of nuclear power stations. Officials are understood to have asked the Tokyo government whether it will inject funds into planned new reactors at Wylfa in Anglesey and Sellafield in Cumbria. They will be built by the Japanese companies Hitachi and Toshiba. The talks underline Britain’s desperation to get its long-delayed nuclear renaissance back on track — and its difficulty in financing it. EDF’s planned £18bn nuclear plant at Hinkley Point in Somerset has been dogged by delays and cost increases. This weekend Jean-Bernard Lévy, chief executive of the French power giant, warned that it could pull out of the project unless it receives financial support from the French state. Hitachi and Toshiba hope to use their British nuclear projects as a showcase for Japanese reactor technology. However, sources said the suggestion of Japanese state equity triggered a “Mexican stand-off” with Whitehall officials, as Britain remains unwilling to inject taxpayer funds. They added that talks were at an early stage and investment might come from Japan Bank for International Co-operation or Japanese financial institutions. Hitachi’s adviser, Rothschild, is understood to have written to the UK government to suggest it take a stake in the Wylfa project.
Sunday Times 13th March 2016 read more »
Cameron’s subsidy-free nuclear plant awaits French state aid. STEPHEN LOVEGROVE can’t have been expecting much as his flight landed in Tokyo. The permanent secretary at the Department of Energy & Climate Change flew there this month for delicate talks on Britain’s civil nuclear renaissance — and Japan’s place in it. Back home, the news was unrelentingly bad. The board of EDF, the debt-ridden French giant chosen to lead the British charge, had repeatedly delayed its vote on approval for the £18bn Hinkley Point project, this country’s first new nuclear plant in two decades. Hinkley will need financial support from French taxpayers. “We are currently negotiating with the French state to obtain commitments allowing us to secure our financial position,” he wrote. “It is clear that I will not engage EDF in this project before these conditions are met.” The letter put paid to the fiction that David Cameron has long tried to sustain, that Hinkley Point would be the first atomic power plant in the world to be built without public subsidy. The reality: the project won’t happen without generous support from not one but three states — Britain, France and China, whose state-owned giant CGN owns a one-third stake. Britain will not give direct aid but has guaranteed that British households will pay artificially high bills for 35 years to fund the project — a tax by another name. This was the context for Lovegrove’s trip to Japan. His mandate was to convince the government there to consider stumping up billions of pounds of taxpayer cash to ensure that nuclear reactors steered by the Japanese giants Hitachi and Toshiba do not run into the sand as Hinkley Point has. Sources close to the talks said the answer was an unequivocal no, especially given that chancellor George Osborne has gone to such great lengths to ensure the Treasury is not on the hook for new nukes. The source close to the talks said a “serious standoff” has developed between London and Tokyo over the issue. As EDF wobbles and Tokyo digs in its heels, Lovegrove has his work cut out if he is to stop Britain’s nuclear renaissance going off the rails.
Sunday Times 13th March 2016 read more »